There was a time when I would have rather died in unpublished obscurity, than to have published with what was known back in the day as a “vanity” press. It was costly, there were no distributors, authors humped books from event to event, stacks of stock sat in basements, it seemed ego-driven, and many felt as I did that if I wasn’t good enough for “real” publishing, then I wasn’t good enough.

But, having been published the “real” way, not once but 4 times and with 2 different presses; having garnered an agent, shopped to and waited on big houses, and spent way too much of too little royalties on events, readings, promotions, marketing, FB, Twitter, my blog site, I am seriously considering how to get the most for my energy.

With ebooks and POD options now available directly to authors, and internet companies that do much of the publishing-work: from covers to accounting, for myself, already working hard for my books/publishers,already treating my career as a business, and already having an established readership, I am coming to the place where I think self-publishing could be an exciting new path to take; however, having said this, I have done a year’s worth of research on ebooks, I have calculated my time and resources, and have weighed the pros and cons–to be sure, serious self-publishing with the goal to make money, is not something an author should take lightly.

In the meanwhile, I had to smile at all of the contributing authors’ comments regarding this topic, each has dutifully plugged the books, as will I: Cat Rising, Girls With Hammers, Babies, Bikes, and Broads, and the soon to be released, Angels & Manners–10/2010

There is a thing called a back list. There’s also a thing called a marketing team. Now, if each and every author newly signed to a major house is automatically a success . . . a marketing team is completely unnecessary. Those are dollars the pub house could better spend in other ways. However, the back list, the catalog, is filled with books, and most of those books won’t find space on the brick and mortar book store shelves. This is the job of the marketing team, to sell as many of those books as they can to each book store.

There is a finite amount of shelf space to display a rather large amount of books. Each pub house publishes thousands of books each year, and there are several pub houses vying for all of that shelf space.

With that said, it’s not just up to the pub house to sell each and every book they print. Most books from new authors the pub house actually takes a gamble on. The pub house is looking for the next big thing in publishing, but they have no idea who that will be, so they take a chance on several new authors who they think have potential. However, it would be financially irresponsible for the pub house to put money behind each and every new book they publish. Business simply doesn’t work that way.

Which means each new author needs to promote their own book themselves. Which also makes sense as to why pub houses tend to look FOR those authors that have put all of that leg work in already. The pub house is betting on what’s almost a sure thing at that point. The author has already built a following.

With that said, the author could actually build more of a following on their own and keep even more of the profits.